theodp writes "Remember Mr. Microphone? If you thought music couldn't get worse, think again. Perhaps with the help of R&D tax credits, Microsoft Research has spawned Songsmith, software that automatically creates a tinny, childish background track for your singing. And as bad as the pseudo-infomercial was, the use of the product in the wild is likely to be even scarier, as evidenced by these Songsmith'ed remakes of music by The Beatles, The Police, and The Notorious B.I.G.."

Car Analogy Please writes to tell us that a new car unveiled at the Paris Auto Show was modeled after the Gran Turismo 5 Prologue car. GTbyCITROËN is the first car that has been designed in tandem with a video game to then spill out onto the actual pavement. "The GTbyCITROËN is the product of a partnership built up during the creation of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. Takumi Yamamoto, from Citroen and Kazunori Yamauchi from Polyphony Digital Inc, the games developer were inspired by each others industries to design a concept car for the game that then flowed further into the real-world. The game version of the car mirrors the real-world performance of the concept."

Valve made a brief announcement on Friday that they will be allowing the download of user-created game mods directly from Steam. "Once installed, these MODs will appear in your 'My Games' list and will receive automatic updates just like other games on Steam. Also, these MODs now take advantage of Steamworks, which provides stat tracking and tighter integration with the Steam community." Mods will be available for five different games to start, and more in the future.